


He Who Desires

by linguamortua



Category: The Revenant (2016)
Genre: Edging, Epistolary, F/M, Historical, Masturbation, Other, Period-Typical Racism, Sexual Fantasy, Shame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-21 23:22:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6061948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain Henry is the sole arbiter of justice and civilisation in Fort Kiowa. He has a reputation to maintain, and order to uphold. There is a part of him that wants to succumb to sin and vice. He keeps it tightly controlled.</p><p>"Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." - William Blake</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Who Desires

**Author's Note:**

> I've drawn upon a combination of material from the film, and from historical records of Major Andrew Henry. He did indeed marry a woman a great deal younger than him who was the daughter of a business associate - one Mary Flemming. I've used places and dates in accordance with what is known of his life. (No news on whether the real Henry was in the habit of furtively masturbating under beaver skins, though.)
> 
> Please note that this is set in the 1800s and so Henry's opinions about Native American people are fairly unsavoury by modern standards. Nothing in here comes close to the film but still, proceed with caution.

_4th August 1832_

_Fort Kiowa, Northern Plains_

  
_… my dear, I beg you do not worry in my absence. The Purchase this far North may indeed be a wild and perilous place, yet I think I shall do some good here, bringing the light of Civilisation to this untamed land and its People. Not with rifles and fire as in the War of 1812, but through the gentler influence of Commerce. I am fixed on Trade, although it is rather less Gentlemanly a pursuit up here than in the capitals - an Adventure to be sure! - but brave men ensured greater hardships to hack our great Country from the wilderness, and I shall follow in their footsteps…_

The letter lay unfinished on the desk, dated weeks ago but abandoned in the hurry to prepare the ill-fated trapping expedition. Henry had set it aside before leaving Fort Kiowa and now the writing seemed wholly inadequate, the juvenile scratchings of a barely-tested youth. There seemed little point in finishing it in this dire, empty land, where letters took months to arrive if they arrived at all. He tried to picture Mary's face - thin, young, worried. Or, to picture her hunched over a desk, writing a letter to him. He had received none, although she would assuredly have written, for while she was yet shy of him and of her position, she was also very dutiful.

Henry found himself replaying the events of the past several weeks over and over, to a degree that would have been self-indulgent had it not been such torture. He saw everything - from the sudden, vicious attack at the camp to limping into the fort weeks later with just seven men left of a hundred - as being the direct consequence of a series of choices that he had made. Every detail, from the location of the camp to the decision to abandon Glass, had been his and his alone. He had left the mangled and insensible Glass to Fitzgerald, knowing what kind of man he was, and knowing further that the young Hawk and Bridger were in no way equal to the task of restraining Fitzgerald’s violent impulses. The promise of money for any man willing to convey Glass home or bury him, depending on outcome, had had the flavour of a bribe. It now appeared that he had sacrificed all four men, and yet the alternative would have been to doom the entire surviving party. In a very real sense, he had appointed himself the arbiter of their lives and deaths, and his sole comfort was that only God could decide a man’s ultimate fate.

It was possible that, one day soon, Fitzgerald and the youngsters should come walking in through the front gate. Glass, too, Henry supposed, although even fervently believing in the Resurrection as he did, his faith did not quite stretch so far as to be able to picture Glass alive. The guilt ate at him. It crept up on him now and then throughout the day, never entirely leaving him. It happened that the principle of “fiat justitia, pereat coelum” was rather easier to imagine than to enact, and so Henry’s letter remained unfinished for he could not find the words to explain to Mary what he had caused to be done.

He owed her an explanation of his long silence, although it was likely that she assumed a letter had gone astray. He found he could not lie to her, even to spare her tender woman’s feelings. The missive sat dormant until he could find the words. To Henry’s chagrin, he could find plenty of excuses not to put pen to paper, for the daily running of the little settlement here took much of his time. To carve out a tiny chunk of civilisation in these wayward Northern lands was no trivial matter.

It had taken months of back breaking work to raise the fort. The walls had come first, the bedraggled crew of men huddling in tents in a tight, protective cluster as they erected themselves a flimsy sense of safety in raw wood. Then they had laid the foundations for what had become Henry's house. More properly, it was the headquarters of the newly-formed Rocky Mountain Fur Company, but of course Henry resided there as its representative. That had caused no little resentment, and so Henry had necessarily ordered a long, low building constructed next to serve as a kind of mess hall, the men being better disposed to live in leaking tents with a place to drink than be subjected to the reverse. Once the mess hall had gone up, the men were a notch less inclined to gripe and drag their heels, as long as Henry strictly limited the hours during which liquor could be sold. Of course, the men managed to acquire it anyhow. Henry had the uncomfortable sense that he was desperately scooping water out of a mortally leaking boat with a runcible spoon. At least in the Army he had been able to leverage the threat of punishment with all the force of military hierarchy behind him. These wretches responded only to liquor and money and brutality, and Henry did not desire to become a brute.

He desired a lot of things, but he could not - would not - let himself have them. He felt rather like the last man standing between Order and Anarchy.

Such a check to his baser urges had been what had stopped him from shooting Glass on that fateful day on the mountain. Henry told himself that the depletion of Company funds was for a good moral cause, but he could not deny that he chafed at the notion of losing three hundred dollars - a sore deficit for the fledgling business. One that Henry could make up from his personal finances only with great difficulty, and only when he could contact his bankers back in Missouri. Speaking in purely economic terms, it would be better if Glass, Fitzgerald, Bridger and the native boy never returned. There was the rub. To push against his _wants_ , thinking always in terms of _needs_ and _rights_ seemed to bring him nothing but grief. There was no comfort to be had in the righteous pursuit of duty. Everything was sordid. The mud and the cold and the disease and the constant threat of violence from the natives and from his own men were interminable. It wore a fellow down.

The cold was the worst; endless and inescapable, painful. Even hunched over his stove, hands and feet rag-wrapped, Henry burned with the cold. His fair skin was beginning to take on a weather-beaten aspect, where before it had been pale and smooth. His hands looked ancient, and he was sure that the arduous crawl over the mountain pass would cost him his right earlobe. When he thumbed it, it felt thick and hard and it always ached. He wondered what Mary would think of him when - if - he returned to her, older and harder and scarred. Missing some pieces, like an old rag doll. Yes, that was apt, for then he could imagine her carefully sewing him back together with needle and thread and a gentle touch. She had small, clever fingers, and despite her rough upbringing her needlework was good enough that even Henry’s own mother could not have complained of it.

Then, too, the boredom. Although Henry was gainfully employed, even he was not immune to the grinding tedium of life in the fort. Henry rather pitied the men. He himself was simultaneously magistrate, captain, banker, bookkeeper and secretary for the Company, while the men had nothing but drinking and fighting over the local women. A sorry bunch, the latter - scrawny, dark-skinned native girls, diseased and big-bellied with half-breed bastards. Henry had to turn a blind eye, lest he incite a riot among men denied their pleasure. Nonetheless, he was not without moral principle, and routinely found himself dragging away those girls not of a decent age, taking them back to the ragged band of crones camped outside the gate. He tried to ignore the twinges of conscience that reminded him that Mary had been but a scant handful of years older than those girls when they had wed. He told himself that his careful courting of Mary, through her father, was worlds away from the fearful way the men treated the Indian girls. That he was fundamentally different. He was not sure how much he believed himself.

The brutality of the men was partly a result of the excesses of drink. Alcohol turned good men bad and bad men worse. Henry was coming to realise that the rum, a necessary motivator for the men, was a symptom rather than a problem. An attempt at an antidote, perhaps - to the grinding misery and despair out here on the edge of civilisation.

He would not let himself succumb to the temptation of liquor.

 

* * *

 

_17th November 1832_

_Fort Kiowa, Northern Plains_

_My dear Mary,_

_I have been very low of late and it is hard to explain quite what a Burden winter is this far North. We have lost three men to the cold in the last week alone, for they will persist in drinking to excess and then falling asleep outdoors. Another has been sent to the Surgeon, who will remove a leg black with the “frost bite” - he is not expected to live._

Henry set down his pen and wiped his ink-stained fingers on a rag. This new chapter in his letter, appending directly after the old, had immediately developed a morbid cast that he did not care for. The hour was growing late, and as the night had fallen, so had Henry’s mood. He slid the flimsy lock across his door, pulled off his boots and stomped upstairs, candle in hand. There had been an oil lamp, at first, but now there was no more oil to be had and likely would be none until spring.

Sliding into his bed fully-clothed, as always, he contemplated the list of tasks awaiting him the next day and sighed. A competent clerk could doubtless manage half of them, but with Glass and Fitzgerald absent, there were barely any other men who could read and write in the camp. Sutter was tolerably literate when sober, but he was never sober. And Worth, despite his name, was a furtive little weasel of a man with a hanging scar and an ugly brand over one cheek. He wrote an excellent hand, but Henry would not countenance allowing him any responsibilities at all, let alone responsibilities which would allow him access to money or information. So, all the workings of the camp fell to Henry. Glass, Fitzgerald and a few others had been the only ones who could aid him, and all were dead or likely soon to be. As the arrows had rained down upon their trapping camp, some few bold men had tried to rally the wounded and confused. As they halted their flights to encourage others along, they had been cut down - thus was their bravery and foresight rewards, thought Henry with bitterness. He wriggled his toes, trying to warm them.

A second person in the bed with him might have helped. Henry closed his eyes and tried to conjure up an image of it, drifting back in time by a year, and across the wilderness to his boxy little house back in Potosi. A small bedroom; a second-hand bed. A living arrangement that his respectable parents, had they been alive, would have looked down on, but which was tolerable for Henry and Mary, who had grown up in the wilderness and knew not the comforts of middle class town life.

On their wedding night, Mary had been clad neck to ankle in a lace-edged linen nightgown, and it had been too cold to disrobe. He had lain down beside her in their marriage bed and fumbled the gown up to her waist. The room had been dark that night, and he could not see her after he blew out the candle. She had been stiff and nervous under him, tight with it; so tight that he had had to slick his cock with spit and guide it into her with a shaking hand. At the time, his inexperience - nearly as great as hers - had been shameful enough that the entire night had been tainted by his sense of abject failure. He had eventually managed to push inside her and spend his seed, but then they had rolled over and said no more that night, nor spoken of it the next day. Now, however, Henry thought he would withstand any number of torments to be back in their bed together. He could barely remember what it felt like to slide his prick into her cunt.

It was a sleazy thought, and it did not warm Henry; rather, he felt obscurely ashamed, as though lusting after one’s wife was inappropriate. He slid his hand down the front of his breeches and ran it over his cock. It twitched a little under his touch, but his hands were still cold and he could not make himself hard.

That was just as well - the pleasures of the flesh were more temptations that Henry had no time for. If he started now, he might too become one of those sad, morally depredated trappers, fumbling with unwashed girls in the taproom. He closed his eyes and made a futile attempt to sleep.

 

* * *

 

_8th December 1832_

_Fort Kiowa, Northern Plains_

_… had been thought lost, and yet in a strange twist much like a sailor’s yarn he returned to the Camp today, with a Youth called Bridger._

Fitzgerald was back - the event had rocked Henry. He had dashed from his house with little care for dignity, to see the grizzled man stamping through the gate with young Bridger in tow. He had never liked the man, exactly, but he could not deny that a sort of joy welled up in his breast to see him again. That even two of the four men had returned felt like a cause for celebration. When he sat them down to hear their story, Fitzgerald was appropriately sober, clearly moved by the experience of caring for Glass in his final hours. Henry rather thought he could sense something like a spiritual change in the man, for his speech and manner were more careful and respectful than they had been previously. Bridger was colder, quieter, but Henry was not surprised. The ordeal had been a brutal one for a man grown, and Bridger was still very young.

He paid Fitzgerald and Bridger, too, although the latter refused the money, caught in some kind of melancholy or malaise. Well, the boy would recover.

That early burst of gratitude for the lives of Fitzgerald and Bridger ebbed away like water through cupped hands. By the early evening, Henry found that he could not contain his grief for Glass and his half-breed son. They had been a queer pair, insular and uncommunicative, more than a little wild, both, but Henry had respected Glass’ judgement. He had been a solid, reliable fellow and Henry felt his loss keenly now that it had been confirmed to him.

That evening, he walked across the frozen dirt to the tavern and procured a tin cup of the foul liquor that passed for rum here. It burned his mouth and throat going down and it hit him hard. After the first, he drank another. No man would approach him and sit with him - he held himself apart as might a ship’s captain. He would have liked company, were anyone of a fitting status to sit with him. Eventually, Fitzgerald came in and took his portion of liquor. He had no particular interest in adhering to social conventions, and so he walked across the room and seated himself opposite Henry. They drank in silence for a moment, and then Fitzgerald began to talk - about money, about collecting the pelts they had hidden after the attack weeks ago. About Glass. The mention of Glass’ name in Fitzgerald’s rough tongue worked some kind of alchemy in Henry. His grief began to curdle into anger, and before he could stop himself he found himself speaking with unnerving truth.

‘When the weather warms, we’ll go back out there,’ he told Fitzgerald. ‘To collect the pelts. And to shoot some fucking civilisation into those savages.’ He grimaced and finished his drink, his lip curling back at the sting of it. Fitzgerald showed his teeth in what passed for a smile. Henry hated that. It was an imitation of companionship that they were sharing. He disliked extremely the man’s rough manners and violent ways, and yet, he was the closest thing to an acquaintance that he had. Henry left his cup on the table and departed without a word, angry at his lapse in judgement and lonely, desperately lonely.

Once locked inside his house, some of his equanimity returned. He snatched for it through the haze of drink. He set a teapot on his round-bellied stove and brewed himself a cup of weak tea from old leaves. Sipping at it brought him further back to himself. By the time he climbed the stairs to his bed, he felt almost himself again. He crawled under the layers of beaver and bear and wool, piling them atop himself as usual, and closed his eyes.

There had been something supremely satisfying about cursing in front of Fitzgerald, and it came back to him now. He felt a somewhat warm and light from the alcohol, still, and before he knew it his hand was cupping his prick until it came alive a little. He imagined sitting across the table from Mary in their parlour with tea cups between them, as he had sat across from Fitzgerald earlier, and telling her about the _fucking savages_ up North - or, better, more satisfying, telling her how he would _fuck_ her, using the word, spitting it out with lips and teeth and tongue. She had no doubt heard the word before. Perhaps she would enjoy it.

Henry squeezed himself through the dirty linen of his underclothes. He worked his hand down them so that he was touching bare skin. There were inklings, suggestions, that Mary would be amenable to his intimacy in time. They had managed just a few months of married life together until Ashley had approached him with a business offer and he had left town. In those months, there had been a rhythm established. She would go to bed. Later, he would follow. If she was awake, as sometimes she was, he would reach for her gown and she would let him ease over her and then into her. At first it was a quiet, awkward affair, but then he realised that he could stroke at her, rub between her legs or run his hands over her small breasts, and she would sigh and move under him like a cat.

He recalled her wetness on his fingers, and felt his own now; he was hard and leaking and palming away at himself. Perhaps he should be firmer with her. Perhaps a man like - a man like Fitzgerald would not inch over the bed towards her. A man who would swear easily, and drink, and take what he wanted from life, might have a different approach. He pictured himself taking her over the table in the parlour, dress hitched up. Henry’s breath caught in his throat and he jerked himself harder. She would be on tiptoes, for she was shorter than him by several inches. He would put his fingers into her from behind, and then his prick, and she would make a high sound, a little squeal of bliss. Henry bit his wrist and moaned around it. Mary might pretend to be coy, as he had heard that well-bred women sometimes did, and he would slap her buttocks and fuck into her harder, fuck the shyness out of her.

She might look around at him and - no, Henry could not picture that, could not see her face any more. He could not remember how she looked, and that realisation jolted him from the fantasy. His cock throbbed in his hand, insistent and hot, and he pulled his hand from his underclothes in sudden disgust. He was close enough that he had to stop moving, lest the friction of his cock on his linens make him come untouched. Henry breathed short and sharp through his nose, and stared relentlessly at the ceiling until he softened again.

He did not sleep until very late, and when sleep came it was full of nightmare images of Mary, frostbitten and dressed in rags, crawling through the camp while men jeered at her and exposed themselves.

 

* * *

 

_16th December 1832_

_Fort Kiowa, Northern Plains_

_We are fixing a date for our Homecoming, our numbers having been much depleted since our arrival here several months ago. It will be a long journey back. Many of the men are rather ill from Misuse and a poor diet, in addition to their great Excesses of Liquor. I dare say we shall be a sorry sight as we arrive in Washington Country. You must not expect me soon, my dear woman, and my Return may even come before this Letter, but know that we shall be reunited before the Spring of 1834 is over._

Henry signed the letter with a flourish and stoppered his ink bottle. A party of three men were making the arduous journey back to the nearest sizeable settlement. It would take them at least two weeks, and probably more, but Fort Kiowa was now very sadly provisioned indeed. They would not last out the spring without supplementing their rations, besides which there were barely any candles left. Some sundries like pins and thread and bootlaces were needed as well, to prepare for their departure in late January. The men would leave tomorrow and come back with a small train of horses; Henry had rushed to finish his rather disjointed letter. He folded it carefully, wrote the address on it, wrapped it in a square of oilskin and tied it closed.

He did not feel lighter for sending it - the contents were frequently grim and yet they glossed over the realities of his life more than he would have liked. He felt keenly the absence of a confidante, and Mary was indeed wonderful in that regard, being most content to sit for hours and listen to him speak of business while attending to her sewing.

It was impossible to picture coming home to a clean house, with pleasant paintings on the walls and a housekeeper to cook, and a wife, and a warm bed. Henry had caught a glimpse of himself yesterday in the reflection of a window and seen a man ten years older than his years, scoured by the elements and by circumstance. He had carefully preserved the edge on his razor but now it was sorely lacking in efficacy, so he had developed a mountain man’s beard. His hair was straggling and could not be cut without he ended up a scarecrow, so that was left to its own devices, too. Soon it would be long enough to put back in a sort of queue, which Henry supposed might look better. These thoughts occupied him as he took his letter down and handed it to Dawes, admonishing him to be sure and take it directly to the postmaster. Then there was a leather pouch with some business letters, and then a horse was lame and a replacement had to be found, and some of the dried meat was bad and their meagre supplies had to be portioned out afresh. Two men got into a miserable excuse for a fight and had to be sewn up by the surgeon, and Fitzgerald had to be censured, for he had stood by and watched the wretches go at each other with knives and done nothing.

By the time Henry dragged himself to bed, the concepts of civilisation and home seemed like idle philosopher’s fantasies. His body hurt, and his teeth especially felt sore and loose, for there had been not much to eat but dried meats of late. He hoped that he would not be tipped into a real scurvy, as the thought of losing teeth repulsed him on a visceral level.

He rolled himself in his blankets and lay on his front, trying to ease his aching back. When he shifted, he rubbed against the beaver fur under him, and then he did it again, purposefully. To test out the sensation. He groaned quietly, more from despair than arousal, and turned over onto his back. He bit his lip, and then, with a sense of defeat rolling through him, he once again eased his hand down to his cock and stroked it alive.

If he had to relieve himself this way, he thought, then he would not think of Mary, would not sully her with his disgusting, gutter perversions. He closed his eyes and pleasured himself for a minute, trying to conjure some pleasing image. It was not easy.

Without fully comprehending why, he reached an absent hand up under his nightshirt and dragged his ragged fingernails over one nipple. His breath caught and his cock jumped in his hand. He clawed over his chest again, and the memory of Glass’ ravaged flesh came to him with hideous immediacy. The animal lust in his belly wavered into nausea and back again. He considered the girls in the tavern, half-drunk and half-asleep and half-exposed, their breasts spilling from their loose tunics. Their dirty hands, and the way they would bounce on a man’s cock in full view of the room.

Henry gritted his teeth. His cock ached for release, release that he had not had in months - that he had denied himself, as he had denied himself so much else. It was surely less sinful to make private use of his own hand than to indulge in a crude fuck with a drunken camp follower. One's wife could not decently be transported and housed in a makeshift frontier fort in Indian country. To think profane thoughts like these - of Glass’ torn body, Fitzgerald’s tightly coiled rage, the thin, dirty legs of a whore in what passed for the tavern - was obscene, but he could not stop the images coming, nor could he slow his hand pumping at his cock.

The furs on his bed were faintly damp and stinking like everything else in this hell hole, but Henry could risk no sound escaping and so he buried his face in them and sucked in short breaths through his mouth. He lay awkwardly, neck twisted to one side as if snapped. Comfort was no longer a consideration in his life. Neither was pleasure, but he felt it now, the liquid feeling of arousal in his cock and balls and belly. He scraped at his nipples again, and then lower down across his stomach. A muffled sound escaped him; muted anguish, cut with want.

His back hurt and his teeth hurt and his extremities hurt and his hand was aching and stiff, and his cock burned with friction and desire and lust; Henry moaned through his teeth, overwhelmed. He gripped tighter, stripping away until his head was arched backward, neck bow-string taut. The slow trickle of salt and wet and musk from his cock slicked him, and his foreskin rolled and rubbed over his cockhead. Every breath brought him closer to the edge, to the point of no return. He could stop now, with no evidence that he had touched himself. He could stop, and roll over and go to sleep. He could stop thinking about the sweat and muscle and skin of other bodies, of the dirt and blood, the accumulated miserable products of life here. He could stop thinking about the rough, hot slide of skin on skin, the slap of bodies together, the way grimy, hard fingers dug into soft flesh.

He could stop - no, he could not stop, he could not. His climax built in him until he was wound up like rope on a windlass, his feet curling into points and his nails rough and mean on his skin. He came with a high, unsteady moan into the furs, spurting hot over his hand. It trickled down his knuckles and pulsed once, twice, spilling down onto his thighs. Pleasure throbbed through him and left nothing in its wake but a kind of soft, loose fatigue.

Henry’s muscles relaxed, and he pulled his face from the furs, sweating and panting. He sucked in air and let himself sink into the layers of bedclothes. His semen cooled on his hand and skin, an uncomfortable reminder of the sordid little episode. He wiped at his underclothes, but the thought of moving from the warmth of his bed was intolerable. The whole event had been intolerable, a disgusting reminder of his moral weakness. Sleep overtook him quickly nonetheless, peacefully dragging him into unconsciousness in a way that had not happened in a long time.

He slept like a child that night, and he did not dream.


End file.
